Scenario

We are Ruby on Rails developers (Silvio Relli and Matteo Papadopoulos) sharing the same office at Cantiere Creativo. As often happens in web agencies, for small or medium websites projects, the boss wanted a quick tool to setup a website, manage contents, reduce development time and costs.
Rails is our favourite framework but the admin interface is a big missing and build it from scratch all the time can take a while.

We didn’t want to use WordPress (max respect for this piece of software!) or others php based CMS.
Django could be the solution but we did prefer to use our favorite framework as we are more confident with it.

So, at the end, the solution is always the same: build your own CMS! Aaaarrrgghhh!!!! And we have done it! :)

We love to be part of the community and we absolutely wanted to share this project; we wanted Railsyard to be free and everybody can fork it and gives his contribution (or not!).

History

Railsyard is a CMS made with and for Ruby on Rails. It was born one year ago to build several websites for Cantiere Creativo, the company who invested on this project.

The first release of RY, built with Rails 2.3, was published on a GitHub repository but it was a first attempt written in “rush mode” (as often happens in software development).

What’s going on

In July 2011 we did release the second version of this CMS written from scratch in Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2 (but it can also run with 1.8.7). In August we made many commits of new features and debugs. This has been possibile thanks to a first project of a customer that is actually running in production. At the same time the community started it contribution (as hoped!) and @paul_spieker is actually a great contributor!

Features

From my point of view (front end designer), these are the main features:

• You can easily create own themes with your favourites tools (js, scss, sass ecc)
• Multilangs support for the whole contents and admin interface
• Has fews but usefull snippets ready to use
• It’s easy to build your own snippets for advanced personalisation
• It’s easy to design layouts and manage contents
• Has pages and articles
• You can manage meta information for each page.
• Has a really good WYSIWYG editor
• Has an intuitive drag and drop admin interface
• pretty urls and other seo-friendly features
• different user roles
• You have Rails behind and you can build your own controllers/model/views

A first public theme has been release in these days. It’s not so “beauty” and it’s called “rough“. We just wanted to give a first simple theme, extremely cleaned, with three different layouts (one, two and three columns); it’s a basic theme to let users to be free to personalize the css and design for a new own theme. It uses a responsive grid system (fixed or fluid) with an html5 markup, scss and jquery.

Next step will be e good looking theme just to show how Railsyard can be used with different templates.

Lot of features and good proposals are still in our mind and we are really excited of this tool that is growing up, day by day! Stay tuned, it changes quickly! Have a look and enjoy it!

I’m actually working on this project with @silviorelli

Update 9 november 2011

Following yesterday’s coverage of Railsyard on ruby5, here you can find some direct resources for tracking our progresses:

• official railsyard twittter account: @railsyard
• official project page: http://www.railsyardcms.org
• Fork on GitHub GitHub repository
• Cantiere Creativo (the lead agency)
• Silvio Relli twitter account: @silviorelli
• and finally, my twitter account: @spleenteo

I didn’t try this version yet but just today I’ve decided to begin my new rails project with the new one. There are already lot of resources out there on the web. The screencast are always extremely usefull, I do suggest every developers to put an eye on them.

My doubt since now was, as for every new release, the compatibility with the most common plugins I use in my projects. This is the big question: are my plugins ready for Rails 3.0? Fortunately, thanks to Rails Plugins Compatibility website, I could checked that lot of plugs are 3.0 ready and for that I feel ready to begin!

So happy I can use JQuery as I did wish since many time! A big thanks to Prototype and Scriptacolous that served me so well in these years!

So, let’s try it!

Sviluppato per Max Mile Srl insieme a Joe Yates, Aaron Craig, David Librera, mi sono occupato principalmente della parte “front end”.
Il sito è sviluppato con Ruby on Rails, il backend interamente gestito con EXTJS

It might be a problem, an “old” well-known issue…

sudo gem install mysql

might return an error like:

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)

    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Well, this is cause you need the -dev environment of mysql. Too easy to think that it could be mysql-dev, no! just try

apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev

It will works!